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At once an engaging portrait of a cosmopolitan African city and an exploration of colonial irrationality, Urban Design, Chaos, and Colonial Power in Zanzibar opens up new perspectives on the making of modernity and the metropolis.
A selection of papers first delivered at the conference on Africa's Urban Past, held at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1996.
The essays in this important new collection explore the diverse, unexpected, and controversial ways in which the idea of civil society has recently entered into populist politics and public debate throughout Africa. In a substantial introduction, anthropologists Jean and John Comaroff offer a critical theoretical analysis of the nature and deployment of the concept—and the current debates surrounding it. Building on this framework, the contributors investigate the "problem" of civil society across their regions of expertise, which cover the continent. Drawing creatively on one another's work, they examine the impact of colonial ideology, postcoloniality, and development practice on discourses of civility, the workings of everyday politics, the construction of new modes of selfhood, and the pursuit of moral community. Incisive and original, the book shows how struggles over civil society in Africa reveal much about larger historical forces in the post-Cold War era. It also makes a strong case for the contribution of historical anthropology to contemporary discourses on the rise of a "new world order."
Global Downtowns reconsiders one of the defining features of urban life—the energy and exuberance that characterize downtown areas—within a framework of contemporary globalization and change. It analyzes the iconic centers of global cities through individual case studies from Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the United States, considering issues of function, population, imagery, and growth. Contributors to the volume use ethnographic and cultural analysis to identify downtowns as products of the activities of planners, power elites, and consumers and as zones of conflict and competition. Whether claiming space on a world stage through architecture, media events, or historical tou...
The two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union brought great changes to the new nations on its periphery. This text offers a detailed ethnographic look at one area of change - the use and understanding of public space in the region's cities.
Company towns first appeared in Europe and North America with the industrial revolution and followed the expansion of capital to frontier societies, colonies, and new nations. Their common feature was the degree of company control and supervision, reaching beyond the workplace into workers' private and social lives. Major sites of urban experimentation, paternalism, and welfare practices, company towns were also contested terrain of negotiations and confrontations between capital and labor. Looking at historical and contemporary examples from Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia, this book explores company towns' global reach and adaptability to diverse geographical, political, and cultural contexts.
Provides the latest insights into, and interpretations of, the history of Africa
This edited volume firmly places African history into global history by highlighting connections between African and East German actors and institutions during the Cold War. With a special focus on negotiations and African influences on East Germany (and vice versa), the volume sheds light on personal and institutional agency, cultural cross-fertilization, migration, development, and solidarity.
Zanzibar Was a Country traces the history of a Swahili-speaking Arab diaspora from East Africa to Oman. In Oman today, whole communities in Muscat speak Swahili, have recent East African roots, and practice forms of sociality associated with the urban culture of the Swahili coast. These "Omani Zanzibaris" offer the most significant contemporary example in the Gulf, as well as in the wider Indian Ocean region, of an Afro-Arab community that maintains a living connection to Africa in a diasporic setting. While they come from all over East Africa, a large number are postrevolution exiles and emigrés from Zanzibar. Their stories provide a framework for the broader transregional entanglements of decolonization in Africa and the Arabian Gulf. Using both vernacular historiography and life histories of men and women from the community, Nathaniel Mathews argues that the traumatic memories of the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964 are important to nation-building on both sides of the Indian Ocean.
Abena Ampofoa Asare identifies the documents, testimonies, and petitions gathered by Ghana's National Reconciliation Commission as a portal to an unprecedented public archive of Ghanaian political history as told by the self-described survivors of human rights abuse.